Copyright is claimed by Rodger R Ricketts, Psy.D. All rights reserved, Fair use is granted, 2022 by Amazon KDP.
In this chapter, we reviewed several Apophatic methods to access the Oneness or No-Thing. They all begin with the incorporation of virtue, compassion/kindness and wisdom to oneself and others into everyday life. By giving up the cravings and obsession with sense gratifications, anger/resentments and egotistic selfishness based on a dualistic worldview, one’s life is unfolded by a degree of true peace of mind created by a virtuous mind and action: at this point, one is ready to move to the higher levels through meditation/prayer.
The Buddha’s pure experience unveiled for him the delusion of the cognitively based complementary relationship of the dualistic subjective/objective world. The supreme non- dualistic apprehension of existence is accomplished by consistently bending one’s awareness to the natural and higher, purer states of mind. Release from the lower to higher states is accomplished by silencing the separation created by dualism and the subject/other split. Therefore, the prescription is to do nothing, relax, be alert and allegorically let the mind, be like ‘the lotus flower blossom’, rise above the ‘muddy paddy field’ of worldly obsessions. The final stage of meditation is reached by becoming aware of and letting go of everything that alienates us away from being present in the All. When that happens, we understand and empathically feel that everything is inter-being, interconnected and all living Beings are Family of the Universe or Divine. The realm of pure experience is not an ontological category, but the ordinary world of phenomena experienced directly, with no intervening conceptualization.
Finally, as philosopher, educator and writer, Martin Buber wrote in ‘I and Thou’,
“Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity…. I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached a non-differentiable unity of myself without form or content. I may call this an original pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged beneath all biographical change, all development and complication of the soul.”